Planning permission newbie

[Wood89]

So me and my husband have found a perfect bit of land as we want to build our own house ...(field behind my parents house) it has been unused since I was born 30 years... no animals on it or farm work it is just over grown and surrounded by farmers growning fields and my parents house.

Went through my friend who is a solicitor and she found out who owns it but she said to make sure we can get planning permission before we approach who owns the land to make an offer she also said as the land has been unused and over grown the owner might not even no it belongs to them...I would like to get the land surveyed and valued before approaching the owner..but I thought for planning permission you needed to prove you owned the land first? And of course I don't want to spend loads of money for the owner to turn round and just say it's not for sale!..

Any information on what steps to take or if anyone has been in the same situation would be great..for information purposes I live in Aberdeenshire  thanks 

[ProDave]

You can submit a planning application on land that you do not own, but you have to serve notice on the owner saying you have done so.  We did this when buying our plot as we wanted to be sure we would get planning before buying it.

 

If you are getting planning first, expect the owner to want building plot price for the land.  The alternative is try and buy it as it is with no planning for less and take the gamble, but then the owner may put an uplift clause on it anyway.

 

You really need to speak to the owner first or it all could be a waste of time.

[newhome]

Are you sure that planning permission hasn't been applied for before by the owner and refused? If planning permission is possible I wonder why they haven't got it themselves, or they may just not want to sell / develop the land yet. I think your only chance is to speak to the landowner. Alternatively maybe your parents could approach them and say that they would like to buy it to extend their garden or similar, and not mention building on it initially. 

[Ed Davies]

You could ask the owner if you could buy an option on the land. You give them x thousand pounds to have the right to buy it for y thousand pounds in the next z years. If you can get planning permission then you buy, if you can't then you've lost x and the cost of the planning application. If they're done nothing with the land for quite a while then presumably y could be quite small and z could be quite long. You'd probably want a clause that says they can't object to the planning application!

[Onoff]

15 minutes ago, newhome said:

Alternatively maybe your parents could approach them and say that they would like to buy it to extend their garden or similar, and not mention building on it initially.

 

...and hope they don't read this!

[Wood89]

There hasn't been any applications on the land previously the owner of the land his father used to own alot of the land in the surrounding area and from what I no the owner sold his rather large house for alot of money and has moved to another part of Scotland...i think nothing has been done with it previously as the family had more than enough money to fuss about a small patch of land ?‍♀️

[newhome]

Go for it as a garden extension then. It may increase the value of your parent's house anyway as a garden extension even if you can't get PP just now (and assuming you can afford to just buy it speculatively). 

[ProDave]

Since you are in Scotland, I would first try and buy it and get change of use to Garden to extend your parents garden.

 

Then, if your local plan is anything like ours, it would be almost a given that you would get planning permission to build on "garden ground"

[Ferdinand]

1 hour ago, Ed Davies said:

You could ask the owner if you could buy an option on the land. You give them x thousand pounds to have the right to buy it for y thousand pounds in the next z years. If you can get planning permission then you buy, if you can't then you've lost x and the cost of the planning application. If they're done nothing with the land for quite a while then presumably y could be quite small and z could be quite long. You'd probably want a clause that says they can't object to the planning application!

 

The initial option fee should be 1-2% of the potential purchase price if it is on the same range as ones I have been offered.

 

F

[Ralph]

We went and had a consultation with a planning office before we approached the owner of our plot to get some idea if there was even a chance of planning. 

We then contacted the owner and after a lot of negotiation we had a solicitor draw up a contract (split the cost 50/50 with the owner) that we would purchase and he would sell to us at a price, only if we were granted full planning and had a favorable ground engineer report. There was a suspicion that the ground may have been unsuitable, turned out it was fine.
 

A number of people had approached him in the past to buy it cheap for a garden but he knew exactly what they were about. 

 

We took a kind of risk averse approach and it worked out OK for us. We paid more than I wanted for it but it was still under valuation for a plot with planning.